ivoras writes: "Interview with MSI's director of U.S. Sales Andy Tung has this interesting snippet: "We have done a lot of studies on the return rates and haven't really talked about it much until now. Our internal research has shown that the return of netbooks is higher than regular notebooks, but the main cause of that is Linux. People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don't know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it's not what they are used to. They don't want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.""Link to Original Source

Irrespective of the headstrong self-awareness of bulk consumers as noobs, there might be pure technical reasons to it. No matter a particular distro is tuned and tweaked to boot in 5 sec, when it comes to opening a.doc file, it's to be done in OpenOffice.org only, and *that* is slow.

Suggest refurbish those returned netbooks and ship a modded Windows 95 with an XP look and feel?

Linux Distributions even the Mighty Ubuntu have serious UI and experience problems...I have NEVER had a 100% clean Ubuntu install. There was always cases where I needed to go to a config file somewhere and past it in. Or had to google an answer why X didn't work. Then there is the stupid naming conventions of the apps.Lets think of this from a Windows users.Pidgen Internet Massager: I have never heard of the Pidgen IM service. I need to get AOL IM, or Microsofts one...openoffice.org *: openoffice.org sound

There's one important thing you've overlooked here - the netbooks we are talking about here have Linux on them out of the box. Which means that if things don't work properly then guess whose fault it is? Yes, right first time, the manufacturer.

BTW, not everyone has the same troubles that you do. On my laptop, suspend and hibernate work perfectly with Ubuntu, no config file editing required.